Free An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell Page B

the language well enough to compose a eulogy for the still living Augustus. “The eulogy and the language it was written in were lost centuries ago. Not a word survives,” Alex told her.
    “That’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard,” she said, to which he replied, “Precisely.”
    She moved to Princeton while Alex was in Europe. The day after he landed they each drove five hours to meet midway.
    Suzanne dresses for practice, veering from black so that Petra will not interrogate her more. The jeans she once had to wriggle into slip on easily. She pulls on a tee-shirt and sandals, pins up her hair, skips makeup when faced with her reflection’s pointed watching. She does not want to see herself.
    She almost doesn’t answer the phone, but after years of waiting for audition calls—and then Alex’s—it is hard for her to ignore a ringing phone. There’s always the chance that the news is good, that the voice is beloved.
    The voice on the other end says her name, repeats it and then asks, “Do you know who this is?”
    “Who?” Suzanne echoes, but her chest tightens because she is almost certain that the voice she is hearing belongs to Alex’s wife, that this is not good news at all.
    “I need to see you.”
    Her chest squeezes itself, a vise, and her stomach contracts. “That’s not a good idea. It’s better that we don’t.”
    “We have shared something important, no? There’s a connection between us whether you want there to be or not.” The woman pauses. “I need to see you. You need to come to Chicago.”
    “I have to go right now, somewhere to be.”
    “All right, but I’m going to call back if you don’t call me soon. I assume you’ve dialed this number before? Talked to my husband in our home?”
    “Yes,” Suzanne whispers and hangs up.
    Petra and Anthony are arguing when she enters the practice room, but their words lack heat. Suzanne unpacks her viola, tunes, rosins her bow, still trembling as she watches these two people capable of arguing ideas without emotion. Daniel, for whom all arguments are personal, has not arrived. When they were students at Curtis, Petra made the mistake of sleeping with Daniel. He struggled with her moral philosophy, with her assertion that she could be a loyal friend even as she was an unfaithful lover. “If you’re going to ask me to sleep with just you, then we’re breaking up immediately,” Petra told him. A rough stretch followed: Daniel throwing rocks at the windows of the apartment, Daniel phoning drunk in the middle of the night, Daniel wetting Suzanne’s shoulder with his real tears. It took about a month for his understanding that Petra was a friend worth having outweighed his desire to sing lead in a tragedy quickly turning trite.
    Suzanne learned something about Daniel that Petra does not understand: for him everything is personal. If Petra and Daniel argue over politics or movies, and certainly if they argue over music, the differences in their opinion are, for him, indicators of moral difference. He either assumes she’s inferior or fears he is. It’s something Suzanne understands, feels herself when Ben mocks a piece of music she loves or makes a cutting comment about performance as a goal in itself.
    But for Petra, arguments can be sport, and she and Anthony push back and forth the idea of performing the Black Angels Quartet .
    “I think it’s a perfect time to play an antiwar piece. Don’t you agree, Suzanne?” Petra spins her gaze, glances at Suzanne.
    Suzanne once played the piece, subtitled Written in a Time of War , in a course in which the professor was trying to teach his students about gesture, both physical and musical. She shrugs under her viola as she places her fingers on the strings, trying to steady herself as she warms up. Her right wrist feels weak, her biceps tired. There is a sharp pinch just inside her left shoulder blade.
    “You don’t have many opinions of late,” Anthony says. “Funny thing is that